5 Trauma-Informed Practices You Can Do Via Zoom
As leaders and professionals in youth-serving organizations, we know that the immediate and long-term effects on our children and youth from this traumatic year could become dire—especially when the 2020 anxieties are coupled with already-existing trauma or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
Trauma-informed approaches are not new to youth-serving organizations. Positive youth development provides a pretty clear foundation to support youth and many programs are taking it to the next level by adopting Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s more encompassing vision of healing-centered engagement.
And yet, while youth-serving programs in our networks take a trauma-informed approach in their regular in-person programming, many have been asking us: How do we best support young people with trauma-informed/healing-centered practices when we are still interacting with them remotely? Goooood question. We have some thoughts.
First and foremost, get grounded yourself. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve heard so much about the importance of self-care: “you can’t pour from an empty cup”, “put your own mask on before you help others”…but, do you know that we have still received eye-rolls from some folks when we say self-care is critical? Literal eye-rolls—we know because we’re on cam—mostly from program administrators who say they are looking for ways to support their staff. Well, to benefit staff, self-care needs to be modeled by leaders; and, self-care needs to be modeled by staff to benefit youth.
So, do what you need to do to care for yourself—meditate, take a walk, drink a cup of tea, take a break. Understand how you are feeling, what your triggers are and how you can respond so you do not transfer your anxieties or heaviness to the staff or young people you’re working with.
Now, try these trauma-informed practices that can be done via videoconference:
1) Set community agreements. Creating a sense of safety and belonging is important in a healing-centered space—even if it’s a virtual space. Invite your participants to create community agreements as “a way we all agree to interact and be when we’re together.” When working with youth, you can do this as a dialogue, with a piece of chart paper on the wall behind you, through the chat function or through a collaborative tool like Jamboard. As a dialogue in Zoom, for example, you might say:
“Just like we have ways of working together when we’re in-person, we need to have ways we agree to be together when we’re here on Zoom. Take a minute and jot down one thing that is important to you in how our community works. (Pause). Here are some ideas to get us started and then let’s add your ideas.
Be here. When you’re online with us, stay with us! Try not to get distracted by other online apps.
Share and care. Give your thoughts and ideas and listen to other people’s ideas, too.
Elicit other ideas that may include Have fun, Take turns to talk, Speak from your own experience, Assume good intentions, Challenge the idea not the person, Step up/step back, etc. Get a thumbs up vote from all participants in order to adopt the agreements.
When youth engage in setting the community agreements together you’re providing an environment with shared ownership and promise of safety to participate fully. It’s important to revisit the community agreements at the beginning of every meeting as a way to acknowledge how you all plan to engage with each other during the time together.
As a facilitator, your role is to refer participants back to the community agreements when needed to reinforce that safety through consistency. For example, “Just a reminder, we agreed to have a clear space around ourselves so we can all be safe during the physical activity time. Can everyone please make sure their space is clear now before we get into the movement activity?”
2) Keep a routine. Unknowns and things outside of our control can add unnecessary anxiety and stress to participants. You can minimize that by setting a predictable routine for each session. That means having a clear and consistent schedule with the same start time and end time each day. It also means the repeating structures in your agenda each day. While the activities you do will be different, the structures should be the same for each engagement. For example, your session agenda might look like:
Welcome/Check-In
Physical Activity/Game
Learning Challenge
Groupwork
Wrap-Up/Check-Out
Setting consistent structures also allows you to model how to lead each activity which then enables you to pass the leadership of activities to young people. For example, after you’ve led the game for a few sessions, ask which student wants to take a turn giving directions to the group. Over time, you can fully pass the leadership of the activity over to youth. Shared ownership, autonomy and youth leadership are a few practices in high-quality learning environments that build protective factors associated with positive youth outcomes. There’s more where that came from—read Promising Practices for Building Protective and Promotive Factors to Support Positive Youth Development in Afterschool.
3) Warmly welcome each person by name. Dale Carnegie said, “Remember, that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” It’s true. Yes, it takes a little extra time, but for many of your youth participants, the time they are on Zoom with you may be the only time they interact with a caring adult and caring peers that day.
Spend time supporting your positive, trusting relationships with youth. We know it will pay off for them down the road. Want to know more? Read Why Trust Matters, a study by Aisha Griffith & Reed Larson.
And while saying a child’s name aloud on videoconference is not the same as greeting them in-person with a handshake or a pat on the back, it is an essential interaction. Hearing one’s own name triggers the brain in a positive way. Begin each session with a warm welcome to each participant, using the correct pronunciation of their names.
4) Guide a mindfulness time. Part of healing-centered work is actually teaching young people how to re-set, refocus and find calm. When the external world is filled with unpredictability, we can help young people find stability within themselves. That starts with (you guessed it, see above) being grounded ourselves. Then, you can facilitate a meditation or mindfulness time during your sessions with youth. You do not need to be a yoga teacher to do this. Yes, it may feel awkward the first time you do it, but you’ll get used to it just like you’ve gotten used to teaching via Zoom. ;)
Consider integrating a breathing exercise, a guided visualization, or a body scan—whatever fits for your group. For example, here’s a peaceful place visualization:
“Today, I want to invite you to think about a place that you find very calm and peaceful. It may be a place that you have visited in the past or seen in a movie, or it may be a place you have created with your imagination. I want you to close your eyes now (if you feel comfortable) and imagine yourself in that very peaceful place for 1 minute. In your mind, notice the colors and sounds. Notice peacefulness all around.”
After the minute is up, ask the following questions and have several students respond to each of the questions.
“Think quietly about why you like this special place.”
“What do you see there?”
“What makes it so peaceful to you?”
5) Encourage young people to dream and imagine.
“The greatest casualty of trauma is not only depression and emotional scares, but also the loss of the ability to dream and imagine another way of living. Howard Thurman pointed this out in his eloquent persistence that dreams matter. He commented, “As long as a man [woman] has a dream, he [she] cannot lose the significance of living”.
~Dr. Shawn Ginwright, The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement
This! This is what we do in youth programs, right? In our programs, young people can play, reimagine, design and envision. We need to have space to do that virtually, too. For example, invite some silliness in to your virtual meeting time. Try fun activities like:
Charades
Drum circle with whatever “found instruments” are nearby
Freeze dance
Kahoot! quiz game
Bring in imagination by building upon the visualization above. For example, say:
“Now that we have listened to one another share about our peaceful place, let's take the next five minutes and draw that special place on a piece of paper. Feel free to use your imagination and if you want to give your peaceful place a name, you can do that as well.”
Offer project-based learning experiences that empower young people to envision the world they want to live in and create social action projects to make real change. We can empower youth to imagine another world as Arundhati Roy describes in her essay, “The Pandemic is a Portal”:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal. A gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
As we are experiencing, as our youth and their families are experiencing, upheaval of our ways of life upon layers of a global pandemic, our country’s systemic racism and political fractures and our own fears and anxieties, we’ve got trauma. Couple that with ongoing trauma already experienced by BIPOC communities, LGBTQ communities, and other historically marginalized communities…we have some serious healing-centered work to be done. Youth-serving organizations are key to doing this work. We know how to do this work. We do this work. With a few adjustments, we can continue to do this work virtually, and must.